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Citavi Support (English)Topic Question Citavi 6

Category Citavi 6

Tags sort, copy, search, pdf, book-chapter

Comments/questions from a new user

Sebastiaan R. shared this question ago

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Dear Team,

I recently started using Citavi, after changing jobs, so I may not be fully up-to-date about all the options. Before, I mainly used Reference Manager, and I have some experience with Endnote. There are several features I appreciate from Citavi, but I seem to be missing some other options, and a few things could be done easier. Some issues that currently come to mind:

Enable ordering the citations as follows: first author; year; other authors. Currently, this doesn’t work properly; first, it orders on first author, then on the next author, … and only after that, it will order on year. Not having this option makes it unnecessary hard to find the right citations in larger datasets.

Copying between projects;

- At this moment, it’s too cumbersome to copy references from one dataset to another. After having indicated the destination project and whatever other info in advance, a single (mouse)click, e.g. via a button on top of the Citavi-window, should be sufficient. Another option would be to drag the references to the other project by mouse.

- And it would be nice to stay in the original project window, after copying references, so one can move on to the next references that need to be copied into the new project.

- Would it be possible to have a ‘Parent Project’ which contains all references ever collected, and that all new citations that are added to dedicated work-projects also end up in the ‘Parent Project’, to keep a complete dataset of references?

Change the way how search-results are displayed. My suggestion, create a temporary project to make it easier to quickly check and work with the search-results. Also, make it possible to copy all search-results (or a selection) to another project by one or two clicks.

PDFs;

- Provide an option to link to pdf files on computer instead of uploading the pdfs. For various reasons, I do want to keep a folder with separate pdfs of my collected papers. It seems a waste of space, to have all pdfs copied for all of the projects that I created.

- When I double-click, at the bottom of the Reference field, on the pdf, it seems obvious to me that I want to open that pdf. I find it very annoying that another screen opens, asking about what I want to do, and that this extra screen doesn’t close automatically.

- Use more intuitive names for pdf files, e.g. first author, year, and, if necessary, a, b, c, … After opening several pdfs, it is hard to move from one to the other, as the file names provide no information.

Is there no option to add a reference as a chapter of a book, so one can include the chapter info (authors, title, pages, … and book info (editors, title, year, publisher, …)?

Kind regards,

Sebastiaan

The same question

Replies (3)

Anne v. ●

Dear Sebastiaan,

Thank you for your questions and suggestions for improvement, which I will gladly respond to:

Could you please specify where you would like to have this option to change the order? Within your project (list of references) or in your Word document (Bibliography)?
I am going to add your suggestions to improve the copying between projects to our internal wish-list for future versions of Citavi.
The second point of your list (staying in the original project window) could be reached by unchecking the box before “Switch to destination project after copy or move”.
I am going to add this to our wish-list as well.
In local projects you might choose how to link a file to a reference:
https://www1.citavi.com/sub/manual6/en/index.html?linking_a_file_to_a_reference.html
This is not possible in cloud projects, because all data should be equally available when working on different computers or in a team.There are ways to open a pdf in a bigger or full screen within Citavi.
But you are right, if you wish to open a pdf with an external viewer, this screen might be annoying.
Please see our manual to rename pdf files automatically:https://www1.citavi.com/sub/manual6/en/index.html?renaming_pdf_files.html
In this case, you might add the reference as “Book, Edited” and add chapters by using “Add contribution”. You might also choose the reference type “Contribution in…” and add the “Parent reference” when entering the data for the contribution.

Kind regards,

Anne

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Sebastiaan R. ●

Dear Anne,

Thank you for your quick and useful reply.

1. I would like to have the option of changing the order of references within the project (list of references). According to the manual, this should be possible, but in my experiences, it is not (e.g. in the attached example, "Rontani, J.-F.; Belt, ... 2011" comes before "Rontani, J.-F.; Bonin, ... 2005")

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4. I am not sure if I correctly understand they way to rename pdf files, but perhaps, my problems are related to working in the cloud. Often, I have several pdfs open at the same time, and then it's not useful to use the screen in Citavi. In case of the example in the figure above, I have a pdf-file with the name "Rontani 2011.pdf"; this is also indicated in the reference field. When I open this particular pdf, the title in Adobe Acrobat says "0aatupl.pdf".

Kind regards,

Sebastiaan

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Al G. ●

Dear Sebastiaan,

I hope everything is fine at your end.

I would like to welcome you as fellow Citavi user.

I am sorry if I did not get your question right, but regarding you pdf file naming question, you can try to use the feature of "rename files with the Citavi short titles". You can easily apply this to all files on the project or select desired files individually

https://www1.citavi.com/sub/manual5/en/automatically_renaming_files_attached_to_references_in_your_project.html

Sorry again if I misunderstood your question and hope you make good use of Citavi.

Best regards,

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Anne v. ●

Dear Sebastiaan,

This result ("Rontani, J.-F.; Belt, ... 2011" comes before "Rontani, J.-F.; Bonin, ... 2005") is produced, because Citavi considers all authors (not only the first) before sorting by year. We already have this request on our to-do list, to improve the options for sorting.

There is a workaround, to get the correct sorting:

Open the ZIP-file attached.
Click "Tools" > "Options" > "Citation" > "Citation key support" > "Customize citation keys". If you don't see the button, enable the Citation key support checkbox first.
Click "Import" and select the file with the .ckd extension.
Click "Open". Citavi will create or update the citation key for every reference in your project.

Afterwards, you might select the citation key for sorting the references-list:

Click on the gear wheel.
Select "Sort" > "Custom".
Choose "Sort by: Citation key".
Click "OK".

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Kind regards,

Anne

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Sebastiaan R. ●

Thank you for the replies.

Concerning the order of references, the modification works excellent. Thank you!

Concerning the pdf-file naming,

Ii followed the steps for renaming the pdf files. The pdf-names look fine at the bottom of the reference field, but these names do not show up when opening the files in Adobe Acrobat. But it's not a bit issue.

Kind regards,

Sebastiaan

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